On MrBeast

Mark O'Connell's ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star is an interesting and entertaining essay on MrBeast, about whom I knew very little, other than that he's an incredibly successful YouTuber. You'd think I'd have done it by now, but (gasp!) I've not engaged with MrBeast's content. Being of a certain age, I'm not part of his demographic, and also it's not my sort of thing. But the article is interesting all the same:

Everything you see in a MrBeast video is about preventing you from clicking away. His work reflects and intensifies what the internet has done to culture more generally, and to our brains. If boredom, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” - if boredom is a crucial spur to activity, to the capacity to surprise oneself with one's thoughts and impulses - then one consequence of the last decade or so of technological and cultural change has been the total destruction of that dream bird's natural habitat, cleared for the strip-mining of the dopamine that drives the attention economy.

And this:

Donaldson is not himself a political figure. He doesn’t tend to weigh in on party-political questions, or express much interest in them. But there is a politics to his content. It reflects a world in which people are isolated and helpless, subjects of vast and inhuman economic mechanisms. People spending months alone in supermarkets; standing in large circles for as long as they can endure it; competing for private islands, houses, deliverance from their personal financial torments. People in states of gruelling seclusion; people in vast and impersonal crowds, pitted against one another in a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all. Loneliness, survival, isolation, and the divine intervention of an unimaginably wealthy and famous man: there is a politics to all this, all right, and it is the politics of our time. In its themes and preoccupations, its insistent motifs of financial precarity and arbitrary deliverance – its Lamborghinis and its private islands and its vast pyramids of cash – the oeuvre of MrBeast is like nothing so much as the dream of an entire culture.

What a time to be alive!

If the foregoing piques your interest, see also Kevin Munger's In the belly of MrBeast.

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